Here are two ideas for non-traditional news, that would reduce the information overload, and make news more interesting and healthy:
- Actionable news. Only news to which you can (or have to), as a citizen, take some action. Examples: Changes in law, cultural events that will take place in the future, openings of new institutions, planned political demonstrations or petitions.
- Old news. Only give news about something after it is resolved, not when it is happening (avoid especially breaking news). Examples: Instead of speculation who will be appointed to some office, just tell me who was appointed. When disaster occurs, wait three days when the information is more complete about the aftermath. Reviews of products that have already been released.
The trouble is your first and second categories conflict. If someone is about to be appointed to some office the citizenry may want to weigh in on it. If a disaster occurs then people may want to donate money or volunteer to help victims. A product review of a product not yet released can inform the decision of whether to buy an existing product or wait for the new release.
The actual problem is with 24 hour formats reporting things they don't actually know. Which happens because there is an ongoing story with ~15 minutes a day of new information, but just repeating those 15 minutes of information all day will cause you to lose viewers who leave the news on all day and don't want to hear the same thing over and over whereas reporting other stories for the rest of the day will cause you to lose viewers who tune in at random times looking for specifically that information. So they try to report "new" information about the most popular story all day even when they don't have any.
There is a fairly obvious solution to this, which is to discontinue broadcast reporting and provide news on demand. If you want to know the latest on the lost plane, here it is; that story will stick at the top of the page until people stop clicking on it but nothing new will be posted until something new is actually known.
Then let people create custom news streams like channels on streaming music sites: If some news happens with the missing plane then make that the next story in my stream, otherwise give me news about NSA surveillance, then protests occurring locally, then tech product reviews, etc.
The problem with actionable news is that you have to allow some individual(s) to make the decision for lots of other people what is actionable. Chances are you have someone in the audience whose creativity is greater than the filter's and could have figured out an action that was overlooked.
With old news, it does seem like there's a class of news subjects that are picked before ripe in a sense, and it'd be great to stop doing that—but stuff like disaster news is probably best to keep reporting as soon as possible...
"Allowing some individuals to make the decision for lots of other people" is the purpose of a representative democracy. It may not be ideal, but it's necessary because of the size of the group and the logistical nightmare of implementing a pure form on such a scale. Which is, I think, the issue to which this article is a response.
This is a separate question from how to organize our government; the notion of 'representative democracy' doesn't apply to news (at least in the proposed or present form).
The problem with news, as described in the essay, is that it's mostly not useful. The above solutions talk about ways of filtering it in order to make it more useful. Filtering, however, isn't the only way of solving this problem. For example, you could keep all the information available but categorize and label it, or impose some sort of hierarchy. Of course options for doing that are limited (though not exhausted) in traditional, non-interactive mediums—but that's probably a large part of why communicating it in an interactive medium instead is the current trend. Which obviously comes with benefits of de-centralization when done via the internet.
I think the solution is, as in the article, to stop consuming traditional news sources; there are intrinsic limitations to informational organization in a static medium. Instead, grab something interactive where you can select what's relevant to you.
> the notion of 'representative democracy' doesn't apply to news (at least in the proposed or present form).
I think it does. Serious news publications are de facto appointed representatives of the public, to hold politicians and officials to account, with their influence largely decided by the number of people who buy their newspaper.
> "Allowing some individuals to make the decision for lots of other people" is the purpose of a representative democracy.
Lots of forms of government do that. The purpose of democracy is to provide a more graduated use of force spectrum for countervailing force than 'get screwed' or 'civil war' to attempt to keep those decisions roughly in line with what the electorate would choose were they in that position.
You would probably really enjoy Delayed Gratification. It's a quarterly publication that wraps up global news day by day from 6 to 3 months prior (e.g. the March issue covers Oct/Nov/Dec). They have a great mix of short and long form articles and I think a reasonable balance for world news.
In my opinion The Economist does a pretty good job of waiting for more concrete information before publishing any story. They never do 'breaking-news'.
Sooo... volunteers to make these? They sound like great ideas. Not sure how you monetize, as ads are sort of antithetical to the notion of clean, BS-free news feeds, and we're all trained to expect content to be free these days.
I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company.
I worry about this attitude on a macro scale, but it's hard to argue with on a micro one. I spend most of my day following what's going on in the world, and it hasn't added much value to my life. But I worry about everyone not caring. Not because that would kill my company (I started it because I hate news in its current form too), but because there are times when public outrage changes things. It's like voting - my vote doesn't matter, but on aggregate it's everything.
I'm convinced that the goal of a good news publication should be like Google - to get you in and out the "door" as quickly as possible understanding what you need to know. We're rebuilding everything around that. A publication one can consume in thirty seconds with the most important stuff, ruthlessly curated and fact-checked. No entertainment gossip or puff pieces or PR pitches. (To get it as an email sign up at https://grasswire.com)
I'm looking forward to reading what others think on this subject.
I don't think you agree with Swartz at all. You used an article that explains why someone does not read the news to promote your news site. According to the article, Swartz wasn't looking for an alternative way to consume news: he decries the news industry as a whole. I'm all for self-promotion on HN when it's relevant, but Grasswire appears to be exactly the kind of thing Swartz would not be interested in.
If you were selling books or long-form journalism I could understand your post, but as it stands it's blatant self-promotion. And I say that as the founder of a news company.
What Grasswire is attempting to create is the furthest thing from what current media outlets offer. That's why it's relevant.
And for accusing someone of dropping links you sure seem to drop a lot of links to your news site Newslines. Newslines seems to be little more than a celebrity gossip engine. Are you attacking Grasswire because you see them as a competitor?
I add links to my site and blog posts when they are relevant to the discussion, unlike Austin's link here, which is actually contrary to the point raised in Swartz article.
My site is not a competitor to Grasswire. Grasswire is an attempt to fact check news streams. Newslines is a news archive with no fact checking at all. As I said, I used to run a fact-checking site, so I have some experience in the area, and a continuing interest in how fact-checking may work.
I am interested in all of the new news entrants, and you will see my comments on posts about Infobitt, Grasswire, Inside.com and other sites in many places across the net. That said, I have not directly criticized his site, and only said that I think fact checking in general is over rated. Unfortunately, Austen has taken my comments as a personal attack on him. He should grow a thicker skin.
I think getting feedback, positive or negative, from the community is extremely valuable. Your observation that my site is "a celebrity gossip engine" is useful to me, even though you intended it as an insult. Thanks.
I started the news site because I have the same frustrations Swartz has. Most of the news is bullshit and a worthless time-suck. All of the examples he uses, all of the websites out there, feel completely irrelevant to me and not interesting whatsoever.
I disagree with him that it's 100% - I think it's just 99.9%, and that .01% is valuable. Perhaps that's a major difference, but Swartz's point was that it's not valuable enough to waste time on. I'd like to think that if he could spend 30 seconds to get that .01% of important news he would feel differently. But, of course, we'll never know.
The article decries constantly checking up on the news filling your mind with things that do not actually effect you which leads you to a more unproductive day. I signed up for grasswire a couple minutes ago and at the first moment I'm bombarded with a twitter-like feed of random news events all that have nothing to do with me.
How is this addressing the frustrations you claim to have in common with Swartz?
I find it interesting that someone who is making a news site would say that most of the news is "bullshit and a worthless time suck". Are you really saying that just 0.1% of the news on your site has value? Perhaps you should take Swartz's advice and stop fighting to improve something that has so little value to you.
I suggest that you develop a thicker skin when dealing with feedback. Not everyone thinks what you are doing is helpful or beneficial. I can't speak for Swartz, but his article clearly says that he considered ALL news to be bad and even unhealthy, including your 0.1%. So to claim common ground, or to speak for him, is self-serving.
As for Grasswire, I think your solution to trying to improve the news won't work. As someone who previously ran a collaborative fact-checking site (which included a factcheck watch that monitored the main fact-checking sites), I think fact checking is over-rated. Most people are not really that interested in fact-checking the news, or in even reading fact checks. Fact checks themselves are in most cases just as biased as the reports they claim to fact check.
Nonetheless, I am genuinely interested to see how it works out for you.
It seems to me that you could be a bit better at criticizing; you give this guy a hard time for having a thin skin, but you're being really antagonistic. I agree that his original post in this thread seemed a bit sales-pitch-y, and I resent that too, but you come off as being on full attack. Chill out a little, people will probably pay MORE attention, rather than writing you off as an angry competitor.
For anyone reading this thread later, I should point out that my response above was to a now-deleted part of Austen's mail that accused me of stalking him on the net, and told me to stop commenting on his posts.
I think what you're trying to do at Grasswire is interesting, but I feel like here you're arguing against the very point that Swartz was making. I think of all people he is the last one that you could accuse of not caring, and yet he claims not to have read the news for his entire adult life. The difference is that he voraciously read books [1] and took what I guess was a long view of issues of interest, which I think is what he is promoting here.
That said I still like the idea of being able to "touch base" with the news as it were - something that I can scan quickly and, if I'm disciplined enough, filter down to the bits that are actually relevant to me. Most days, hopefully, that's nothing at all.
Yeah, originally everything was open, we didn't even require a login to upvote/comment/etc. Then some folks from ISIS came on and started trying to muck everything up, so we had to throw a gate on it (banning by IP was just too chaotic). We'll add some more info to the gate soon.
I don't know what you can do on your site, because I didn't want to sign up, but you can look at HN without having to sign up and you still need an account to vote or to comment.
Yes, that will be how it works in the future, but we haven't had time to build out the non-logged-in states of everything. So it's a hacky solution, but we just threw up a wall for now.
> It's like voting - my vote doesn't matter, but on aggregate it's everything.
Circle of concern versus circle of control. Pay attention to things proportionally to the amount of control you have over them, rather than worrying disproportionately. (And if you want to care more than that about something, find a way to have more influence on that something.) If you have a vote on something, you have a non-zero but very tiny amount of control over it; spend time educating yourself appropriately. But the vast majority of news stories discuss items that should not in any way affect the actions of the people watching them.
Also, considering that later in this thread you explicitly describe your service as being for "news junkies"...
That's a really good frame of reference, I think. Thank you for that.
I consider our service like Wikipedia - there is a small collection of people who are just abnormally fascinated by the news - the 1% of news junkies who want to see what's happening, vet it, and tell you if it's wrong. The biproduct of that is that the 99% of "normal people" get a news digest that contains only the most important info, that's easily digestible.
So the current website is for news junkies, just like the "talk/edit" part of Wikipedia is for... encyclopedia junkies? The daily email and coming read-only stuff is what I hope is appropriate for 99% of people, including someone like Swartz.
A vetting process seems like a useful filter, but it's not a sufficient one. Vetting doesn't necessarily affect stories that are factually accurate but irrelevant.
What is your definition of "important"? Or, more importantly, what definition of "important" does your community of "news junkies" apply? Because almost by definition, those "news junkies" have a different idea of what's important than other people do.
There are two main functions on the site. One is a fact-check, the other is an upvote. People are told to upvote the most important info - we define "most important" as "having the most affect on the citizens of the world."
Of course, that's very difficult to quantify, and there may be some bias of the news junkies, but I think the end product is pretty great (though not perfect yet). Of course that's just me, and I'm probably biased as well, but there have been times when I have said the news coming out of grasswire is complete shit, so I'd like to think I'm at least trying to be honest with myself.
My company considers one of its systems "more secure" because they enforce a policy that all passwords must contain 8+ non-space characters. The implementation? "Must be 8+ characters; must not contain spaces."
I've expressed my view on this (and similar password-related policies) many times, but apparently it's all simply a box ticking exercise for pen testers...
That looks really cool - I haven't seen it before, thanks!
The "offending system" I mentioned, however, is our old PHP application that I don't really work on. (I mainly develop much more modern Rails stuff!)
Like I said, the primary concern of the company is simply to keep pen testers happy - and their criteria for a "secure" website is, in my opinion, often misleading or even downright wrong. But if I ever get the chance to genuinely improve the system, I'll definitely look into using this.
I guess I must be too dense, but I simply do not know how to use grasswire.
I'm stuck with live feed on left which shows me exactly the kind of useless "breaking" stuff I want to avoid and popular feed on the right which I don't seem to be able to control beyond either providing fact-check or comment.
What you're looking at is kind of like a backend - consider it the "talk" page for Wikipedia.
It's a little bit chaotic this early in the morning, but our algorithm pulls in the "breaking" stuff on the left, and the most upvoted stuff flows to the top of the "popular" page. Grasswire users fact-check stuff for accuracy, and comment on whether or not/why it's important. The site is mostly for news junkies. It's a little bit hectic right now because a bunch of people from HN are just upvoting random stuff to screw everything up, and it will take the power users a minute to sort through it.
The result is at the end of the day, the best stuff curated and fact-checked by a couple thousand people, and we send that out to the everyday person in an email they can digest in 30 seconds. We're adding a short, editable description to each news item to give some background, and allowing anyone to submit external stuff, so it's still a work in progress, but that's the gist of it.
I really like this. I too am sick of seeing stuff promoted in everyday media which is clearly fabricated.
Admission. I think I up-voted some comments by accident. It's not obvious what that large up arrow does (now that I say it out-loud I think it's probably pretty obvious!) and there's no way to undo the operation. Sorry.
Well once I push these code changes in the next few minutes you should be able to click on the upvote again to remove it. For now, don't worry about it :)
We see the "frontend" as a daily email that goes out or an app with a daily push notification that says "Hey, here you go, the best news of the day in 30 seconds." So the hours of work that the people are putting in on the back-end really just reduces the amount of time for the end user. We could probably hire five people to do that, but it's important to us that it's democratic and open.
That all makes sense. In terms of a frontend I was thinking of a read only type system. At lunch time I come to HN to entertain myself. Occasionally I jump over to bbc news (which is pretty dire) or aljazeera. It would be great to have a page I could drop into to get the digest.
Very interesting concept. I signed up; we'll see where it goes.
One thing to note, though - on the left I'm seeing a number of duplicated entries, with the duplicates immediately after the original. I'm using Firefox, if that matters.
The site looks slick, but it doesn't have some features I'd expect and want from a news aggregation site. I can't find any way to search for news about specific topics, for example.
Great landing page, I'm sure conversion rate is good. But the visuals don't make me want to stay, even with the mini-tutorial its a little annoying.
Crowd-sourced fact checks are an interesting idea, I'm not sure it works for news. You need to be fast and thorough, which is hard.
I'd love to have reliable background information for long-running issues, like the Ukraine crisis. Maybe this will be easier, as the value can accumulate over a longer time period.
Thanks for the feedback. What "visuals" are you referring to that don't make you want to stay?
It's tough for me to grasp what someone wants/needs to stick around. Right now we have a pretty good core of hardcore news junkies that come every day, and maybe that's OK for the curation/fact-checking side of things, but what do you want/need?
We're adding a "background" area to each news item. That was an issue that I didn't really have at first because I sit there and watch the news all day, but turns out not everybody is like me :). That may take a couple weeks along with all of the other changes we need to make, but it will be in there.
We're consuming propaganda either way. Media outlets chose what to write about and what not to cover, then stories that match people's biases tend to get disproportionately popularized. I hope that this fact-checking feature can at least do something against news sites publishing obvious lies and misinformation.
I think the problem with news is that it is has become driven by the imperatives of Google (a company which makes money from advertising). Those imperatives lead inexorably to a thirst for page-views and page-rank, and horrible sites like buzzfeed. I've noticed this evolution in previously respected publications like The Guardian or The Independent in the UK (much Guardian coverage nowadays is centred on clicks, as are initiatives like the i-100).
Here are some tenets to which I think any news company aspiring to change the field and report news responsibly should think about:
Popularity is poisonous and the enemy of the good - what is good or even factually right is often not popular
Context is key - without context, a fact can be meaningless or actively misleading (e.g. the most liberal senator in the senate, 45 minutes from a chemical war from the dodgy dossier).
On the ground observation is key - this is something modern tech has changed in a very positive way, though it does also allow for rumours and misinformation.
Analysis is key - without analysis from informed observers, lots of news is hard to digest and understand - it provides context
Balance is an illusion - Opinions always colour analysis and the facts reported, we should be up-front about this - every org and person has them.
Fact checking with primary sources is key - how can you possibly fact-check factoids that your readers are constantly upvoting? How can you possibly fact check an opinion?
National news is often horribly biased, and national newspapers usually pander to the government/demographic they serve, especially in time of war.
Most public outrage is wrong or at least ill-founded - we have representative and informed democracy to try to avoid the rule of the mob.
Quick news is the antithesis of thoughtful, incisive news
There's plenty of buzzfeed-esque junk out there trying to recycle news and readers as quickly as possible, and it is neither viable in the long term nor is it good for news or for readers. So I disagree completely (as does the article I think) on what you consider to be a good news publication.
PS Your website doesn't even show me what it does before it asks for email, you might want to consider changing that. I tried a fake account and looks like some kind of buzzfeed reuters mashup, and I'm afraid guilty of a lot of the sins Aaron points out.
The sign up process didn't ask me where I was from and/or what I was interested in. For general world news with a reasonable frequency and good digests I've got The Economist. It's the national, local and specialist news that I'm missing.
Right now it's world/international news only. We'll be building out other sections as we scale, but need to nail this down first, and there's a lot of work we still need to do on that.
I just registered. Great work! It's dense, but I think dense is good - it's about information after all. Also, I love the "fact-check" feature. I'll try to use it for a few days and see if it enhances my life in any way.
Minor bug: When I sign up, it immediately reports a failure (Username not available) for a split second before going forward with the registration without a hitch.
> A publication one can consume in thirty seconds with the most important stuff
If you don't allow the user to define "important", it's the same thing. You're just replacing the editors with random fact-checkers who are most likely regurgitating the headlines editors put on their screens.
I was surprised I couldn't filter by region. I think Aaron's point was that if it doesn't affect me, why should I follow it?
I just signed up, and all I see is the equivalent of twitter posts for #ISIS, #Ferguson, and #Ukraine -- for both "Live Feed" and "Popular Feed". Am I missing something?
"They point out that newspapers are a key part of our democracy, that by exposing wrong-doing to the people, they force the wrong-doers to stop.
This seems to be true, but the curious thing is that I’m never involved."
Both parts: that he was involved, and that the wrong-doers didn't stop.
They're still holding office, journals still charge an arm and a leg for publication access, and the last I heard the amendments to the laws that led to this are held up by lobbyists.
I completely disagree with Aaron, who here seems to jump rather quickly to the (merely asserted) conclusion that the news (i.e. the world) doesn't affect him. (Without this same news we would not have heard of Snowden OR, in an ironic twist, of Aaron himself). Furthermore, how ironic is it that we're discussing this itself on a self-purported news site?
The news, even global news, absolutely affects all of us even if we live local, cloistered lives. Let us take the United States - which is overly represented on this site. The US economy is fueled by its finance and investment sectors, which are in turn fueled by neocolonialist enterprises overseas. The success of the US domestic economy is fundamentally tied to its navigating geostrategy and multilateral diplomacy, its overthrowing of governments, stabilizing and destabilizing nations with propaganda and embargos, fixing international law in favor of the leaders of its private sectors, and in its opening resources abroad to US companies is the primary and nearly exclusive driver of the finance sector. And in fact, domestic and international law now blur due to a similarly increased globalization.
I find it odd that Aaron, known for his stance on free access to information and to being informed, would fall only to the knowledge of the academic - and not information and facts about the world in which we immediately live.
Yes there are some truly irrelevant news items (take celebrities). One must filter and prioritize. It is a small price to pay.
I would love to defend whichever notions have offended downvoters.
So I browsed the comment thread, and you are the first "disagree" I found. I am going to join you here.
I think one of the most wrong thing in the article is this statement.
> Indeed, reading a voter’s guide is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics.
Yea, no... A big fat screaming no. A voter guide is a propaganda piece that has ZERO substance. Maybe for the propositions they give a little bit of pros and cons, but for the candidates, they give you nothing. The only way you can discern who is a lying asshole is by following the news. Maybe the conclusion will be they are all lying assholes, but at least you'll be informed of that.
I also think that saying I don't follow the news because it does not personally affect me is short-sighted and self-fish.
For example, those Christians minorities getting slaughtered by ISIS has nothing to do with me. But hearing their stories and learning about them through the news will certainly teach me a bit of compassion that I will need in some random tangential decisions I make later.
I had originally meant to include an argument about voters' pamphlets - I am glad that I did not as you covered it well. The pamphlet summaries, which issues are used for the face of a campaign and how these issues are carefully written about is all carefully crafted PR and not representative of the interests of the candidate, their constituents and investors or of their track record of fulfilling campaign promises. The information you get from a voter pamphlet is what a candidate wants to appear like and which voters they are trying to appeal to. This can help to understand their publicity campaign but it is not enough (alone) to understand their platform agenda.
Similarly, seeing the high coverage of Coptic Christians where coverage of attacks on Muslim minorities (which are much more frequent and equally horrifying) by ISIS and sometimes America, allies or contractors (or of similar atrocities by Mexican drug cartels in the Americas) is missing helps to understand how media and state moral narrative diverges from more universally applied and internally consistent humanitarian compassion - and how and when this and these narratives may align with broad geostrategic policy goals. Insofar as Coptic Christian moral narrative may be used, as an example, as justification for some activity or funding, one will know to look to see if that activity or funding has been a long-standing objective or has been proposed and denied before due to a lack of public support.
Let's say we never had "the news", and we all decided we needed to help society understand and react to novel events. Would we invent newspapers and cable channels? I don't think so.
When modern institutions realize they have an information distribution problem, they don't get a bunch of ink-stained, dubiously sober arts graduates with no special qualifications, and tell them to write stories. They pay people to do regularly updated dashboards or reports with charts and graphs, establish information reporting networks and hierarchies, institutionalize whistleblowers, schedule mandatory periodical reviews of how certain projects are going, that sort of thing.
The human element is necessary but journalistic "storytelling" is just a euphemism for titillation or reinforcement of certain narratives. With minor exceptions, I'm not sure it was ever any different.
Who is the "we" that is doing the inventing? The News God[1] with the power to correct perverse incentives and keep prisoners from defecting? Doesn't exist. The committee of Folks Who Care About Policy And Represent a Broad Cross-Section of Society but Don't Get into Stupid Arguments? Doesn't exist.
Even if they did, an organization would discover that they could get more views and exert more power using titilatory stories. What you propose is not a stable Nash Equilibrium.
This is a great point, but we also know that institutional, internal information distribution systems, of the kind I mentioned, don't fall prey to that. (They may fall prey to other things -- agreeing with the boss, groupthink, etc.)
Anyway the reason why is because they have different incentives. The question is how to make incentives like that work for society, hopefully while keeping the critical independence of the media. We can't imagine that now, but we have new funding forms like Kickstarter, and Wikipedia is an existence proof for achieving consensus about what claims are well-sourced.
But I think we agree that it's not a great idea to run society on an information system that gets paid every time it stimulates our basest impulses for the lowest possible cost. The endgame of that is Buzzfeed.
I disagree. If you want to get people engaged with the level of unemployment in the country, showing them a chart of unemployment figures are not going to engage them much. Dashboards, charts, etc. are great for engaging people in things they already care about.
Instead, a journalist can contextualise those jobs figures and explain why someone you don't know being out of work can affect your life. Narrative is, and always has been, a method of engaging people.
Never mind the fact that journalists also uncover data themselves. Formalising whistleblowers is all very well, but you still want someone to investigate. Take yesterday's story of a Congressman who claimed more miles in expenses than his car had driven - that was a reporter querying FOIL records to match up the numbers. Two completely different data sets in different governmental bodies. There would be no whistleblower there. Who heads up these information reporting networks, the government? What about government corruption?
What you are describing sounds ideal - but that's exactly what it is, an ideal. Very few real life systems work like that.
Full disclosure, I used to study journalism. I'm being intentionally provocative. I do want us to question the idea that journalistic writing skills are essential to the goals we have, of an informed public that reacts with wisdom to events.
It's like questioning why tech executives have to be adult-supervision MBAs from an Ivy league. Ostensibly the MBA is trained to be a manager of $anything, but a founding engineer might still be a better CEO due to their special understanding and vision. And that MBA is never going to have as much skin in the game - they're in it for what they can get.
Similarly the journalist is allegedly better trained to tell the story of $anything, but maybe we could do more effective work with subject matter experts who pick up the basics of fact-checking, storytelling, and information design. And journalists, unless they are assigned to cover a beat or do a long investigation, rarely have much invested in a story - if something else juicy comes up, they're onto the next thing by tomorrow. And in the Buzzfeed era, that's becoming the next few minutes.
Any time you read a story by a general-purpose journalist on something you know well, there's a familiar pattern. It all is very slick and authoritative-sounding, but is usually hilariously wrong and simple-minded. Consider that this is happening all the time, for the subjects where you aren't an expert. So much for 'writing skills'.
In 2010, I was living in Washington DC and one day I heard the pettiest political squabble between two strangers. It prompted me to stop paying attention to politics, which up to then I followed rather closely, because I realized how bonkers it was making me. Everyone is just a bunch of angry assholes yelling at each other. It doesn't improve life, it makes you upset and unhappy. It wasn't too long until I felt similarly about the news, period.
I'd say the biggest challenge in no longer paying attention to the news is the idea that it's a serious person's domain, or even duty. That you're "not a real grown up" if you stop paying attention to the news. Every now and again you'll be among some NPR listeners and you won't know what happened in Kuala Lumpur or whatever. You need to be OK with that.
I came to the conclusion late last year that I was spending too much time reading social, news and commentary - getting really sucked in. It was a massive waste of time, a productivity killer, and often quite depressing.
For instance, I live in a country where the police have no guns, and gun crime is almost non-existent. And yet, I felt like I was constantly reading about police shootings and brutality, (primarily from the U.S). And... it started to really upset me. This news has no context in my existence at all, and yet I know about it in great detail.
Same goes for all the Twitter flaming, and all sorts of other stuff.
I realised it was actually making me very unhappy. I decided to see if I could take a step back - I deleted my Facebook and Twitter, and tried to avoid comments and most extraneous news. I expected I'd go a bit mad, but the opposite happened - I'm actually surprised at just how happier I am now. Ignorance is bliss?
That said, I do believe there is huge value in being informed - but it is hard to regulate and parse all the information out there into something meaningful.
HN is my only vice now - I'm a lurker mostly, and it's work related so that's okay, right? ;)
Several things are currently wrong with the news. From the overuse of the word “BREAKING” (does that even mean anything anymore?) to the lack of verified information (the rush to get the scoop), the news industry is a bit of a mess right now.
It’s overwhelming, and there’s no end to “Oh, you haven’t heard about this? You’re out of the loop!” I always think of this Friends segment where Joey buys a volume of an encyclopedia to try to impress everyone else (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3eD0imnhQ).
I agree it’s hard to see how the effects of what goes on in the world propagate down to how each of us lives our life today -- but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t ever affected by them. I still think we have a basic responsibility to try to understand those things, and the primary goal of news outlets should be to make that information as accessible as possible (while still being accurate).
A lot of people have started turning a blind eye to the TV, but very often they replace it with constant news coverage online. So they really have made no significant change in their lives. They're still spoonfed with something that has never had any impact on them, and most likely never will.
Anything with a significant impact, and unfortunately many things without it, are relayed through friends, family and co-workers.
If the bomb drops or christ returns then we have a warning system setup all over Sweden that wakes anyone up.
I can only imagine bad things from watching the news. I can't prove anything but it can't be good to constantly be told about negative things happening halfway across the world.
That's why I limited my news to Hacker News. Whenever there is an event that actually matters - like a war or a cataclysm - it will be here, upvoted and with comments made by people who know what they're talking about. I don't mind missing the 99% of the typical news sites content.
I've been running an experiment for the past several months to outsource relevant news curation.
It's super simple and super passive. Basically I only read news brought to my attention organically; social media, word on the street which I later look up, etc.
Thus far I haven't missed anything of genuine humanity-shaking importance, my emotional state has improved, and I have much more time for reading, hacking, and all other aspects of my life.
It resonates with the "millennials consume news differently" piece submitted elsewhere on HN actually.
Not really, though I don't claim this has been a truly scientific study. :-)
Generally, the principle relies on "if it's not important [1], people don't talk about it". In other words, anything someone directly or indirectly mentions to me may be of value, everything else is just soundtrack. [2]
Further, I often find that news that does matter comes to me from the likes of a more considered periodical; I learnt a lot of fact-based detail regarding the Alberta oil sands from National Geographic, and I learn about peace process break downs from twitter users I follow far quicker and with less bias than from mainstream media outlets.
Local news tends to be handled by random people I meet on the street. It's effective so far!
[1] This is an overly burdened word in this context. Darfur is very important, but we rarely hear about it, for example. What I mean in this context is "relevant enough to daily life to stop me in my tracks and get my attention". It's worth highlighting here that a lot of very important news doesn't make it to us via mainstream media because mainstream media selects for sales and / or target audience bias / interests, ergo in that sense, I'm actually NOT hearing about important things by tuning in to traditional mainstream media.
[2] People murdering each other due to orders from invisible people in the sky is going to be a soundtrack to my life thanks to the era I live in. I know this happens. It will continue to happen for my life at least. No, I don't need daily reminders of this universal constant. The way I conduct my life and my advocacy against such acts will not be altered because I don't get those daily reminders.
The most ironic thing I think about this piece is that he claims not to have followed the news since he was 13 and has drawn this conclusion...
Having spent a large portion of my life keeping up with the news, other than a few minor quibbles about semantics, I'm inclined to draw the similar conclusions.
Most of what is presented is not news, it's politically slanted propaganda relating to daily events that further the political position of the network that owns that media outlet - this goes the same for papers, TV and radio. They only bring in "experts" that corroborate their own viewpoint, and when opposing opinions stray too far from their party line and cannot be discredited, they're let go. It happens time and again, and eventually you have to wonder why you continue to allow your own perspectives to be influenced by their agenda.
It's gotten to the point where I'm so tired of wading through all the bullshit to find facts or something remotely resembling truth that I frequently wonder why I bother...
We all know at this point that what goes on behind the closed doors of Government doesn't even closely resemble "legal" or "constitutional" and when they get busted, they "welcome public debate" and change the law or reinterpret the constitution to allow their illegal or unethical behaviour to continue and discredit anyone against that as at best unpatriotic or at worst a traitor... you get to a point where you wonder which side is the side of truth and righteousness. Does any of it matter? Is it all just bullshit, distracting us from greater things...?
Yeah, it's sad. I think that investigative journalism should be funded by the public, unfortunately, that's a conflict of interest for the government and sadly, most of the public doesn't really want to know the truth, they want just want to feel that their perspective on the status quo is validated, and that their life can carry on comfortably like it did yesterday... and the day before... and the day before that. And if it isn't carrying on that way, they want to know who to blame for the discomfort that causes so they can go over with their torches and pitchforks and get "justice", whatever the "news" tells them what form that justice should take.
Hmm. I think this article doesn't distinguish between news and bad news. Frankly, anyone reading this must be interested in news, it's in the title of the website. Why else be here?
This site isn't perfect, but it's useful to know what's happening in the tech world. Knowing about the world's current events is similar. We shouldn't dwell on negative events, but they happen and they happen to real people. Just because they don't happen to us doesn't mean it's not affecting us in a broader human perspective. We are all in it together.
"News", I believe, should be about something new or recent. We're now talking about an article (op-ed?) written by Aaron in 2006. This isn't news and much of Hacker News isn't either. It's more just curated information.
I know the feeling, but I worry about the consequences. There are news I think as many people as possible should process. How is democracy or any discussion as a society supposed to work if people don't know about the issues going on? It is a problem that seemingly all news channels use "wrong" selection criteria about what to report, including a lot of things that are not directly important, leading to fatigue and news that are only consumed, not processed. Of course, there probably is no "right" selection of issues, just differently flavored biases.
Many issues that are sort of important I ignore because I can't see how I am supposed to get to an educated opinion about them. There is so much noise and bias going around that I don't have the time and abilities to aggregate them down myself, and no way to know which external aggregation to trust.
> How is democracy or any discussion as a society supposed to work if people don't know about the issues going on?
It's not supposed to work. Democracy makes us fell like we have a say in politics, but we really don't.
If we did, there wouldn't be mass surveillance, governments wouldn't be taking away our rights, and criminalizing entire segments of the population.
But hey, at least we can vote once every few years, for one of two to four candidates who claim to be different (but really just work for the same interests anyway).
Are you sure? Outside of this little bubble we live in, there are lots of people willing to give up every last bit of privacy ("nothing to hide"), in exchange for the government giving them the feeling of "safety".
Well, true democracy is a serious problem for many people right from the start. Which is why true democracy in the world is very rare.
But, once a government reaches the point of what you describe, that is no longer a government of the people and has become something else. Which, according to history, is almost certainly inevitable.
I agree wholeheartedly. The news is no longer interesting and relevant to me, it's merely all the bad things happening all over the world.
i.e. the headline might be about a train crash on the other side of the world, rather than some good story that happened in my own country.
I spent two weeks above the Arctic Circle in September hiking and camping, with no access to the world [1]. When coming back along the road, my car radio was continually searching for a station, and it eventually locked onto one randomly. The first words I heard from "the world" after two weeks were "ISIS Threat".
It turned it off and didn't turn it back on for the rest of the 8 hour drive home.
How would Lawrence Lessig feel about this article? Lessig obviously believes that the U.S. political parties' activities are consequential to everyone's lives.
Aaron seems to reject the notion of the implicit involvement, in a democracy, of every citizen in the affairs of their government. We supposedly elect (a significant portion of) the government, we pay for its activities, so we should care about what it has done and continues to do in Iraq. Virtually every extremist who has attacked the U.S. and lived to be captured and give statements in trial has cited U.S. foreign policy as a chief motivation for their actions. This alone should have us caring about U.S. foreign policy.
I agree that news covers too many topics to report on any of them consistently well (or guard against interested parties shaping the news into propaganda). I think there's a Poe's-Law-type meme about that.
I don't think Shwartz was advocating a position of ignorance regarding geopolitical affairs. Just read a book or an essay on important geopolitical topics instead. If you want to know what important legislation is being advanced go to town halls, visit .gov sites, make an activist friend. All those are better ways to find out what's going on than the news.
I stopped following the news, other than this site, after years of dedicated reading/viewing. I'd become disgusted with the amount of time that's dedicated to manufactured scandal, fained outrage and disemination of non-facts. I'm happier now and actually feel better informed.
Sure, if I want to know about something I'll hit a major news site from time to time but honestly the longer I go without digging through the daily news pile for information gold, the more it just looks like a midden concealing a few soggy turds.
The notion of implicit involvement is a PR strategy for legitimizing a government. If a majority of the population do not feel implicitly involved, they will not care if the government is overthrown.
He uses voting as an example. Which begs the question: why vote?
If you're living within a corrupt, self-serving political system (we are), then naturally the only people who run for office will be products of that system. If a candidate who genuinely wants to change the status quo somehow manages to slip in, they will be prevented from achieving anything meaningful once inside.
No matter what, none of these people have my interests in mind. So I ask, what's the point?
"I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don't vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, 'If you don't vote, you have no right to complain,' but where's the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote -- who did not even leave the house on Election Day -- am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created."
Well the majority of people aren't voting and our system is clearly going to shit on a major level. The point is that it's your civic duty to vote, people fought and died for your right to vote, and it's the best non-violent way for you to impact your world. It boggles my mind when people advocate for others not to vote. You know that's what the power structure wants right? An apathetic population. How on earth can people look at our current situation, where the majority don't vote, and say it's working? How can people look at that and say the solution for more people to not vote? I'll never understand it.
it's the best non-violent way for you to impact your world
Clearly parent disagrees that it impacts the world in any way; simply asserting it is probably not going to change their mind.
You know that's what the power structure wants right? An apathetic population.
Not voting does not mean being apathetic, and vice-versa.
How on earth can people look at our current situation, where the majority don't vote, and say it's working?
I don't think parent is saying it's working, or that the solution is to not vote, but that voting or not is irrelevant to the result, and therefore, why bother.
The so-called "civic duty to vote" is really a civic duty to support whatever is done by the representatives chosen by the plurality of voters. As a task supposedly necessary to maintain democratic society, it is lacking in any personal responsibility; and its practical consequence mostly consists in accepting whatever the people in power decide to do.
In Brazil, voting is mandatory. Yet, somehow, massively corrupt individuals get elected time and time again. Take a look at the massive scandal the current president is involved in (who has been cleared of any wrongdoing, go figure). The previous president who was from the same party was paying the congress a monthly stipend to pass his mandates. Somehow, with everybody in the population voting left and right with all their muster, another corrupt leader from the same party was voted in.
It's almost as if the total number of people voting in Brazil has nothing to do with the quality of the individuals running for office within their system...
> If you're living within a corrupt, self-serving political system (we are), then naturally the only people who run for office will be products of that system. If a candidate who genuinely wants to change the status quo somehow manages to slip in, they will be prevented from achieving anything meaningful once inside.
If these politicians are as corrupt and self-serving as you say, then it actually becomes quite easy to enact meaningful change. All we need to do is coalesce around important issues and threaten to vote politicians out of office if they don't bend to our will. Schwartz himself was one of the individuals who rallied broad segments of the population to mobilize and defeat the passage of the deeply unpopular, industry backed legislation that was SOPA by implicitly threatening to punish politicians who voted in favor of it.
I think people assume that because their vote doesn't cout, their voice doesn't count. Even if you don't vote you can still donate money to opposing political causes (or threaten to), write your congressmen, protest, rally public support, and call out your elected officials publicly. If enough people do this it is possible to elicit change without stepping foot inside a voting booth.
You have gone past the point of healthy skepticism to unquestioning cynicism. The status quo can't be changed? Are you kidding? Is that why we still have slavery in the U.S., women can't vote, homosexuals can't marry, etc?
Change may be imperceptible day to day or year to year, but over the long term, it has been profound and there's no reason to believe it will not continue to be. In a decade's time marijuana will likely be legal in most of the U.S. and the drug war a shadow of its former self. In a decade's time I expect more legal protections for transgender people.
If this is the product of a corrupt, self-serving political system, then perhaps those are good qualities for a political system to have.
Because otherwise you leave the decision to those that do.
Vote. Spoil your ballot paper if you must (these get counted, at least in the UK) but take part in the process. Otherwise you are indistinguishable from those that couldn't be bothered or didn't care.
If we know they don't care what we think, then why would it matter if they knew we didn't care?
If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?
If 40% of the population votes, they don't worry about the 40% who are use voting as the opiate of the masses... the problem they see is the 60% who didn't fall for the scam.
The arguments in the following essay are compelling. I haven't heard much of an argument against them, historically, other than pure sophistry (that domain sucks, etc) or tradition (you should vote because your ancestors voted)
You are conflating voting with spoiling the paper (or voting NOTA).
Interestingly, many countries took measures to prevent people from doing this (e.g. using voting machines).
I don't think the way to interpret his post is to stop reading all news, but to do due diligence and learn how to filter out the shit and focus on the essentials. Not paying attention at all to what's going on in the world makes for an ignorant and useless citizen. Especially since getting everyone to go along with Aaron's suggestion of filling the time digesting news with a book will never happen.
I agree with this. But at least with Twitter, you're the one actively filtering and curating your news feed, as opposed to exclusively reading The New York Times every morning and having the content curated for you.
This is true of sports as well. I can't talk to the average person (and family members) about asynchronous job queues but I can talk about how much the Knicks suck.
I kind of agree, I often feel like I'm addicted to online news. I dislike it's shallowness. I despair at it's ignorance to history and context.
But then, following the news teaches me stuff about the world and how it works. It reminds me how complex the world is and how dangerous. It educates and it coins me.
I've always wondered how Aaron found the courage to live his life and fight for his ideals like he did. Maybe ignoring the larger scope was one of the reasons.
Whoa, what? How can you use 'coin' as a verb in this context? The news turns you into a different word or phrase? You've just blown my mind. Or is that a typo?
> There is voting, of course, but to become an informed voter all one needs to do is read a short guide about the candidates and issues before the election.
I have often wondered how people can make uninformed decisions easily. Now I know.
Only reading a short guide, is akin to reading a Wikipedia article for a monumentally important decision, and not bothering to check the edit history, let alone the references.
Rather than make a snide remark, it's more useful to "steel man" this argument: Consider the X hours you spend over the course of a year reading the news, which for most people you would consider "informed American" is in the triple digits. (That's less than 20 minutes a day.) Now, rather than reading any news that year, imagine that before the election you sat down for X hours and read a some books and long-format essays about the candidates. While reading you are free to look up old news articles when pertinent. Who is the better informed voter? What if you spend only X/10 hours?
I have not heard the term (to) "steel man" (rather than (to) "straw man") before, interesting.
Admittedly, I was writing emotionally, as the sarcastic "Now I know" might suggest. However, I would argue that reading "a short guide" seems vastly different from what you suggest.
---
My emotional reaction was in response to how "a short guide" seems to suggest a very biased source; for instance a pamphlet that might be given out by a political party/group. Perhaps this was a flaw in phrasing, but that does not seem likely to me from the text.
The top address that appears in the dropdown list when I type 'news' is this site. Other hits show up, but the vast majority are related to something 'new' instead.
I used to be a serious news junky, keeping track of everything that happened related to politics or the latest war. I'd even research what was happening regarding local politics in the place I was traveling to just in case the topic came up while I was with some people from that area. I monitored RSS feeds from various news outlets and blogs from others who also watched the news, and over time it became impossible for me to keep up with it.
After that point of realization (that it was impossible for me to keep up with all this information), I then realized that it really didn't matter anyway! The world did not end, my favored side didn't win any less and my most hated side didn't win any more... I just had more time to focus on things that really mattered to me. I probably now have a better state of well-being on top of it all.
"Its obsession with the criminal and the deviant makes us less trusting people. Its obsession with the hurry of the day-to-day makes us less reflective thinkers. Its obsession with surfaces makes us shallow."
I'm gonna be the guy, and risk the downvotes. Its been long enough, and if we're gonna be idolizing this guy we need to have a serious discussion about the naivete of him.
Aaron Swartz claims that politics, news and all that doesn't affect his life. And then a few years later, when he makes the news, he commits suicide. In particular, it was clear that his morals were not lined up to what the powers that be are.
Instead of working to better understand the risks in the "piracy" that he was undertaking, maybe he could have paid attention to the news and garnered a better understanding of people around him.
This "I hate the News" article glorifies ignorance in the most terrible way possible. Especially since it was that ignorance that eventually gave way to Aaron Swartz's untimely demise.
Aaron Swartz eventually did wish to become involved in politics. He took documents from a university and published them online, in the name of "opening up information". If he did so with the naive "I hate the news" attitude however, then he was flying blind. He had no idea how others perceived him, including the FBI and other police powers.
That was his mistake. And it is a mistake I hope no one else makes. If you are going to put your neck on the line and perform a protest that toes the lines of the law... be sure you are ready and willing to receive the attention of the media that will fall down upon you.
On the one hand, we have Martin Luther King Jr. who broke the law, and managed to turn those crimes into a strength. A victory that changed the country for the better.
On the other, we have Aaron Swartz who (probably) broke the law, and instead turned those crimes into a tragic weakness. A weakness that ends in the most horrible way possible.
Note: I supported Aaron Swartz's cause. I've donated money to his prosecution when it came up years ago. So my money and actions are where my heart's at. The irony in this article is rather strong however, especially when we take it into context.
I feel that this was and is a super myopic view to hold, while it's true that most of the worlds news probably doesn't affect you directly, it will almost certainly affect you indirectly, since you live in the world.
It boils down to the same reason you should vote, sure you probably won't swing any elections, but in the same way your voting might influence politicians into listening to the things you care about, by being aware what is happening in and around your city/country/planet you make it harder for people doing shady shit who rely on general public apathy to get away with it.
>while it's true that most of the worlds news probably doesn't affect you directly, it will almost certainly affect you indirectly, since you live in the world.
That's a useless conclusion in itself. There is an unlimited amount of news if you just include the whole world since "you live in it". Do you follow individual county elections for Nebraska? Why or why not? How do you determine what news is important enough for you to follow? Now you are back to square one.
I feel the same way about the news, but I suspect we are both wrong to have this exact reaction. While the bullet points are correct, not wanting to know the news comes from a place of self-centeredness. This is betrayed in the statement that "it doesn't affect me." I ought to have my ears open for problems that I might be able to help solve, but instead I have buried myself deep in my own affairs.
I hope this doesn't come off as an attack. It is not directed at the author or any individual. I just feel like this is an undercurrent in society that is easily overlooked.
Quarterly that covers the news of the last 3mos after all the misinformation peddled by 24/7 news cycle has run it's course. I also like Stallman's political notes as they are brief and he has an interesting perspective sometimes
This misunderstands the point of news. People read it to have common subjects of conversation, filtered through the same perspective. It's actually important to human discourse within society. So that when two people are making small talk, one can say "Did you see what happened with Hilary Clinton/LeBron James/Kanye West?" It's pointless, but pointless communication has a role as a social lubricant. It lets people build up to weightier topics, or just politely pass the time together. And common knowledge of news subjects is a part of that system.
Ultimately, news is a form of entertainment. Now more than ever. People don't watch Fox News or MSNBC to be more informed voters or to take personal action. Many of them want to hear what Personality X has to say about Event Y. Same with twitter or facebook or the opinion section of the local newspaper. And that's cool. If that's what someone finds interesting or entertaining, then so be it.
In general, all of the arguments in this post could be applied to anything that people read, watch, play or listen to. From reality tv to Shakespeare. "It doesn't involve me and isn't useful in my daily life" and "I've lived without it for a long time and my life is no less rich" are generic statements that would be equally valid discussing pretty much any form of diversion. Part of maturity is realizing that the world is full of things that you don't like, and that belittling those things or questioning their value doesn't do any good. We all get to decide how to waste our time. Let people have their news.
There's also an interesting article in The Atlantic regarding the "endless stream" of news. Alexis C. Madrigal makes a very interesting point regarding the stock (what stays) and the flow (what keeps you entertained rather than informed).
I stopped watching the news about a year ago. I have only benefited. My mood is much better (due to not constantly hearing about horrible goings on), and I have more free time.
I have not found that I am out of the loop on anything relevant to my life. I still follow blogs and news sites (and of course, Hacker News). And I still feel that I am aware of important world events such as what is going on in Brazil right now.
Knowledge is power, but useless knowledge is a waste of mental capacity.
I have found that reacting to news in "real time" (for example, as it is fed to me through TV or Facebook) leads to a loss of perspective. The purported urgency of the story overwhelms its broader significance. Discovering news items later or second-hand enables me to research multiple perspectives after some people have had time to digest the event. On the other hand, sometimes the first-hand accounts get edited to have sensational elements removed, and the sanitized versions are less informative.
I've developed similar views of late, especially on political news and online comments.
I feel all those thousands of comments, mini essays, online slugfests, number of likes or dislikes on politics are not going to change even a little how governments work or how decisions are made. I feel I've wasted too much time on such things.
I still follow tech news though, simply because it's interesting to me.
As for crimes and scandals, well, it's not called "crime porn" for nothing!
That sounds exactly like a weekly news magazine. There are quite a few that are worth reading, if you want to follow the news. The slower publishing pace allows a greater perspective and context on most stories that is missing on 24/7 channels.
The Week [1] is an excellent subscription magazine that comes every Friday to my door. It's UK-centric, but has international news as one of its many sub-sections.
This is more difficult than it sounds. The curation part, anyway. "Important" is a pretty subjective, and flexible, term. Something that might seem innocuous now could well have far-reaching ramifications twenty years from now.
Agreed. I tried a 7 day most popular section on http://skimfeed.com and I just couldn't get the algorithm personal enough to be useful. 24 hours seems to be the sweet spot for users.
In my opinion, the best way to consume the news is weekly or even monthly. Give the journalists time to digest and process the news, figure out what's important, and time to write well thought out articles and summary.
I like the Economist for that -- there's a 2 page "world news" digest section in every issue. Some weeks that's all I read. But when I have more time there are also in depth, well written, well edited and unabashedly opinionated articles in the rest of the issue. (I really hate the fake neutrality in most journalism)
What would be really nice would be something similar for national and local news.
Go watch the Selma (movie)? That incident (where news coverage sparked public opinion, leading to political action) provides a great counter-example to the idea that news/journalism is a waste of time.
People's appetite for news is so universal and intense that I have to wonder if it's serving some important purpose that the author is missing.
I, too, have moved away from most kinds of news. I only read tech news, and I could make an argument that tech news is more actionable. But even that, I spend less time on fewer sites. I used to look forward to a chance to catch up on HN, now I read it mostly during moments when I'm waiting for something else.
So, what am I (and the author) missing? Or what is society missing because we don't participate in the news cycle?
Doesn't being more informed about the world and the stories happening around us lead to a richer more interesting life? For instance, I randomly met someone working in racial justice down south and, because I had recently heard about all the issues around how to commemorate lynchings, we had a really interesting conversation about his work and I gained a lot of insight into that story. Does no one else value the human component of news and opinions? I find it a fun part of being a human on this earth
I'm curious what sources others get their news from and how you "cut through the clutter" so to speak. Mine are: BostInno, Abnormal Returns (curates investing/VC/startup/economy links), selected webdev subreddits, hacker news. I imagine this is fairly typical for someone on HN, but maybe not.
Also, does anyone know of a long time horizon news company that primarily provides 3-5 year updates on large macro topics? Actually maybe that's just called "a book"
I find it very ironic that of course I am learning about this thought-provoking post via one of my go-to news channels, HN. Doesn't the very fact that we are having an interesting online discussion about an idea we hadn't previously given as much attention to, because it came up on HN, serve as an example of exactly why reading the news has value in our lives?
Me too. I try not to listen to the radio, read the newspaper, or watch the news on TV. I figure the big stuff will find it's way to me, and the rest is marketing bullshit. News is a commodity, created to sell advertising. Only the big draw stories get air time. Just watch the CBC National; the world is ending every evening, don't miss it.
There is the obvious corporate analogy with news where most data and reports are distracting noise. If it can't have an impact or won't have an impact, stop spending the time and money to report the data as if it means something. This tends to be more a disease of large dilbertian corporations. (Insert Office Space TPS report analogy here)
Ironically, I found out about Aaron Swartz from the news. I'm reminded of "Nietzsche says God is dead; God says Nietzsche is dead". Aaron Swartz says the news is irrelevant. The news says Aaron Swartz is relevant.
"I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. ...Instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party," Emerson lamented in his eulogy of Thoreau.
Since I was old enough to read I've been following the news. Politics, world, sports finance I am really well informed to the point that if someone mentions any recent headline I've read at least one source regarding the topic, usually two or more with updates as well.
During my freshman year of college I stopped following the news. I was so focused on starting off well in school that I avoided most distractions. I found that those months were some of the most focused and productive I've ever had. Sadly I fell back into the habit of reading news articles and catching cable news at night. But I've been trying to stop, although my smartphone is making it very difficult.
Like Aaron points out I can't point to one thing I've read or heard on the news that has turned into actionable information. I also agree that reading better developed thoughts on a specific subject would be more beneficial.
Lastly I'd like to say I really miss Aaron. This post is an example of his brilliance. Depression is a horrible disease and the circumstances surrounding his suicide make it all the more tragic.
In many ways I agree that most news nowadays has no relevance directly to your every day life, as he complains about early in the article, but on a broader scale they do. Later, he agrees with that but says he's never involved. Well, it's cause he chose to not be involved.
Then he says the news doesn't help with his voting choice and he can get everything he needs to know from a simple guide but nothing could be further from the truth. If you really want to get involved in that, you can gather much more information about candidates and their real thoughts and if they would vote how you want them to vote on issues. You won't get that from any simple guide or the TV news.
For example, maybe a bad one, I knew the brother of one of the candidates running for governor a while back. He's an asshole. I worked next to a lady whose husband was in the state legislature and knew the candidate closely. When I mentioned that I met the candidate once before she said, "Good family!". From there I could have learned a lot if I pursued it. You won't learn any of that from a brochure or the TV news.
The problem with TV and radio news is you can't pick and choose what you want to see or hear. Newspapers were good for that. You could flip pages quickly. Online news sources have that ability if online source is worthy and organized but those are few and far between.
In the past, TV news at most stations was its own department, especially at the networks, and not under control of marketing or advertising. This is no longer true. Despite some great reporters still working in newspapers, marketing has taken that over, too, cause the idea is to sell newspapers, not news.
The same is true for television. How often, now, do you see ads for upcoming entertainment shows during the "news"? How often does a new product come out and it finds itself on the "news"?
Unfortunate but true, the real news, along with in-depth discussion and analysis, can be boring to most. PBS probably is the only daily national news worth watching if you really want to learn but you may find yourself nodding off if the subject isn't of interest. Again, advantage newspapers and properly structured online news sources that don't emulate TV (CNN).
I worked in television news for about 10 years long ago with reporters who used to work in respected newspapers. I hate TV "news" today.
- Actionable news. Only news to which you can (or have to), as a citizen, take some action. Examples: Changes in law, cultural events that will take place in the future, openings of new institutions, planned political demonstrations or petitions.
- Old news. Only give news about something after it is resolved, not when it is happening (avoid especially breaking news). Examples: Instead of speculation who will be appointed to some office, just tell me who was appointed. When disaster occurs, wait three days when the information is more complete about the aftermath. Reviews of products that have already been released.